Mr. Speaker, I think the debate on Bill S-17 is very helpful for those Canadians who may be listening by helping people to see more clearly the kind of ideological and policy monoculture that we have here in the House of Commons.
The member for New Brunswick Southwest remarked on the fact that he as a Conservative was supporting the bill brought in by the Liberal government. The implication was that this was somehow exceptional or aberrant or not something that he would normally be inclined to do, but I beg to differ.
When it comes to Bill S-17, to the extent that Bill S-17 is part of a larger way of looking at the world, looking at the economy, looking at the relationship between property and health, I think that in fact there is a great deal of agreement between not just the Conservatives and the Liberals on this, but among the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Alliance and the Bloc, with really only the NDP standing out as a party prepared to defend human health and the Canadian public interest over and against the property rights, as they are delineated in patent law, of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
Some people would criticize us for this. They would say that we are not accepting enough of various economic realities. When they say that what they are really saying is that we have not accepted that the power of the multinational pharmaceutical companies should be a power that is acceded to in the way that all our other political colleagues have.
The member for New Brunswick Southwest cited the fact that in 1987 a Conservative government, long before the WTO and even the NAFTA and the FTA, had moved to change the compulsory licensing system we had in this country by which generic drugs were able to be produced after only two years.
My memory of that system is that it worked very well. My memory of that system is that it coincided with a time in which health care costs in Canada were not soaring in the way they are soaring now. One of the reasons health care costs are soaring now is the soaring price of drugs.
The Conservative member might want to argue that there is some kind of differential between the price of drugs in Canada and the price of drugs in the United States. If that is true, that can hardly be blamed or credited to the fact that we got rid of our generic drug licensing system because the United States has exactly the same system. It is an argument that does not make much sense to me.
The point I want to make is that at least with the Conservatives we kind of know what we are getting. In 1987 they did not hide behind a free trade agreement, a North American free trade agreement or the World Trade Organization. They said this was what they believed. I think it was done largely in the interests of big multinational pharmaceutical companies located in Quebec at the time.
Nevertheless it was also consistent with their philosophy, with their ideology, having to do with property rights, patent rights and the right of people to exploit each other in the marketplace, which is one of their fundamental beliefs. They did not hide behind any agreement although there was some suspicion at the time that they were setting the stage for the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, that in effect it was some form of laying the groundwork for that agreement.
Leaving that aside, at least they were acting on the up and up, so to speak. In 1987 when they did this, and of course during the free trade agreement in 1988 and even leading up to and including the debate on NAFTA, we had many crocodile tears from Liberals, crocodile tears of opposition to what the Conservatives were doing.
Yet the Liberals went on to sign the NAFTA. They went on to join the WTO and to be part of a system which now enforces the very thing they said they were against in 1987 when the Tories first moved to get rid of our generic drug laws.
We have a kind of political monoculture in which the power of property and the power of corporations are ultimate. Whatever they want they seem to get. It has been particularly tragic for our health care system. As the member for Winnipeg North Centre has pointed out time and time again, the price of drugs has gone up some 100% in the last decade or so. This what is breaking our health care system.
There are other stresses on our health care system: the demographic situation, the development of new technologies and the development of higher expectations. All kinds of things are putting pressure on our health care system, but it is very clear that the price of drugs is one of the main stresses on our system, so much so that it not only stresses the system but it changes the system.
One of the reasons people are being sent home earlier from hospital is that the hospitals do not want to pick up the cost of drugs. As soon as they go home they are on their own. They may have some kind of provincial or private plan or they may not, or it may not be a very good plan. Both the system itself is being stressed by the high price of drugs and people themselves are being stressed economically and psychologically by the high price of drugs.
We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. We are really not talking about virtue when we think that the same drug companies the member for New Brunswick Southwest rose to defend were trying to hold out for their right to make hundreds of millions of dollars on drugs that treat AIDS. They wanted to be paid in Africa exactly what they were paid in a clinic in downtown Toronto for those drugs.
They have finally backed off, but did they back off out of the goodness of their hearts or did they back off because it was a public relations disaster? I guess in the end, at one level anyway, it does not really matter. The fact is they backed off and perhaps we will be able to get some of those life saving drugs to the people in Africa who need them.
On a much smaller scale that reality plays itself out across the world, even in the industrialized world and with respect to diseases other than AIDS. We have a system which puts the profits of these companies foremost in the minds of public policy makers.
The argument is that this leads to more research, which leads to newer drugs, et cetera, but I am not convinced that in order to get the kind of research we want in the development of newer more effective drugs, something of which we are all in favour, we need the kind of regime that is now in place through the WTO and to which the bill is responding.
We are very much opposed to the regime that has been set up at the WTO through what is called the TRIPS agreement. That is one of the acronyms we find in WTO negotiations and discussions about the WTO. TRIPS means trade related intellectual property and is one of the tables at the WTO.
There will be further attempts to exploit the kind of knowledge that people arrive at through research to patent things that in our judgment should not be patented. The unfortunate part of the debate is that there has not been enough opportunity to go into the ways in which that will happen. The drug patenting system is a foreshadowing of what the multinational corporations would like to do in a whole lot of other areas, particularly with respect to biotechnology, gene therapy, et cetera. What we have in the patenting of drugs is a paradigm or a model for what they would like to see happen with respect to a whole lot of other treatments.
I met not so long ago with some people in the medical community in Winnipeg who were very concerned, and they have written to the Minister of Health about it, that once various gene therapies have become patented they will not only be bad in principle, to the extent that I do not think these kinds of things should be patented, but may also again drive up the cost of health care in Canada. To the extent these therapies become more and more accepted as ways of treating certain conditions, if it is the case that every time it is used in a Canadian hospital some kind of royalty has to be paid to a multinational corporation, that in itself will drive up the cost of health care.
There are some related issues which we have not had a chance to debate as much as we would have liked. The government is intent on getting the legislation through. We understand that; there is a deadline it has to meet. Is it not interesting that we as a parliament, a sovereign parliament, are having to do certain things that are required of us by the WTO?
That is really what many people are concerned about. They are concerned about the fact that what once would have been a matter of national public policy making, what once would have been a matter of domestic decision making, what once would have been a matter for the Canadian parliament to decide, is now a matter for the WTO to decide. It is now a matter for unelected trade bureaucrats and trade lawyers to decide. It is now a matter for them to decide on the basis of rules designed by and for the multinational corporations to protect their investments and to protect their profit strategies. We cannot figure out what is democratic about that.
I listened to my colleagues on the right, both in the Conservative Party and in the Alliance. They sometimes talk about the way they do not like the power of parliament being usurped by the courts. They are very concerned about the power of parliament being eroded. Yet they do not seem concerned at all with the power of parliament being usurped and eroded by international global and regional trade agreements.
Why is that? Why is there a double standard when it comes to the loss of parliament's power? I would like that to be explained to me some day by my colleagues on the right. Why are they so eager to support the Liberals in their abdication of their power through their complicity in the WTO, NAFTA, the MAI had it passed, and the GATS discussions coming at the WTO?
Why are governments around the world, some unwillingly but apparently willing when it comes to Liberal, Conservative and Alliance members in Canada, so willing to give up their power? What kind of sickness is this that makes governments and political parties that ostensibly want to be able to act in the public interest or on behalf of the common good so eager to embrace self-inflicted powerlessness?
This will be one of the things that many theses will be written about in years to come. What caused this? What kind of intellectual virus inhabited the brains of many politicians in the late 1980s and 1990s of the 20th century and in the early part of the 21st century and caused them to willingly give up the role and the trust that had been granted them by their electors and turn them over to unelected people who were making decisions based not on what is in the interests of health, the public or the environment but on what constitutes a barrier to trade, a barrier to investment or a barrier profit, as if it were the ultimate measure of all things?
We in the NDP do not think trade is the measure of all things. We believe the measure of all things is what contributes to the health and well-being of Canadians and people all around the world. We find ourselves very much at odds with all four parties in the House. We look forward to the final vote on the legislation so that it will be very clear where we stand and where others stand on this issue.